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Performance gains?

O

OBIO

Retired SOH Admin
My current system specs:

Intel i7-950 quad core at 3.07Ghz
6Gig Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600 heatsinked RAM (three 2Gig sticks)
MSI X58A-GD45 MOBO
MSI Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 768Meg video card
Western Digital Caviar Black 250Gig SATA3 C drive
Western Digital Caviar Black 1T SATA3 D drive
Western Digital Caviar Black 500Gig SATA3 E drive
LG Multi-Drive DVD burner
Cooler Master 750watt PSU
3 140mm case fans
CPU cooler from an Intel i7-980.....much larger than the stock i7-950 cooler
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

I am going to be rebuilding my system soon....been up and running for a year and a half now....starting to get a lot of crap files here and there....time for a clean out and a fresh install of everything. I have these upgrades in mind....but want to see if you all think the performance gains would be enough to justify the money spent:

Add 6 more gig more of the Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600 (about 70 bucks)...adding 3 more 2Gig sticks
Swap out the SATA3 250 gig C drive for a new 500gig SATA6 drive (90 bucks)
Swap out the SATA3 1T D drive for a new 1T SATA6 drive (about 110 bucks)
Swap in a Corsair H100 water cooling system....120mm by 240mm with two 120mm fans (around 115 bucks)

I am not a big time gamer. I play America's Army 3 online maybe 3 hours a week. I run FS2004. I play Diablo 2 maybe 2 hours a week.....all game/sim time dependent upon having free time to do so. The system as is runs everything wonderfully....smooth, no lag, no stutters, no complaints. Just thought I'd do some upgrading.....maybe see if I could get the terrain in FS9 to render a bit faster and smoother....but then again, that might be possible just by knowing what to tweak in the sim.

Tim

PS: If I do the HD upgrades....the current 250 and 500gig Sata3 drive would become internal storage drives and the 1T SATA3 would become an external storage drive.....my case has an external docking port for a SATA drive, so I could plug it in when I need to Deep Archive files then unhook it and store it in a safe location when not being used.

And yes...my MOBO has support for 2 SATA6 drives.
 
I haven't built or upgraded anything lately but based on my past experience I'd guess that you aren't going to see a noticeable improvement without upgrading your CPU. Appears to me that you have a pretty darned nice system now.
 
I was kind of thinking the same thing. 6 GB of RAM is generally enough with 64 bit Windows 7, I don't think people are seeing significant gains with more than 6 GB unless you are running some really RAM intensive software or running multiple programs at the same time. I still think speed is more important. Fast CPU, fast RAM, fast hard drives, fast video card and a motherboard capable of fast data transfer rates. You might benefit from a new video card and overclocking the CPU and RAM.
 
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